My biggest gripe with *lemmy is the community search only brings up communities that have already been cached by the instance you’re on

At first I would search for communities and be shocked that there’s so many that don’t exist until I realized I have to manually go on my browser and type myserverurl/c/communityIFoundSomewhereElse@ItsInstance if im the first one from my instance to want to sub to that community

Is there a site that can search all communities that this app can communicate to, then force my instance to cache from a search result?

Would make this app really stand out

  • PriorProject@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It has to do with how federation works. There’s no federated broadcast to all instances in the threadiverse when a community is created. Each instance has to be taught about each community via a search. I think this was done to prevent broadcast storms due to community creation, though in normal circumstances community creation is not a high frequency activity. I think the world would be better off if community creation broadcast but was rate limited.

    At any rate, in the meantime search for communities at lemmyverse.net. It’s way WAY better than the native community browser. Then just use the native community browser to find an sub the specific thing you found in lemmyverse.

    • andyquestOP
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      1 year ago

      Yup but a feature built into the app to search lemmyverse and be able to pull in missing communities to your instance would make this the best lemmy app by patching a huge hole in the fediverse

      • johntash@eviltoast.org
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        1 year ago

        I’d like some sort of remote search feature in Lemmy. Maybe it’d be at the client level, but something that could search either lemmyverse or maybe a list of servers you know about.

    • 6db@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      In that case it seems like there’s should be some sort of GitHub automation tool that maybe uses a network of test accounts from popular instances to sub and then unsub the new community to make it visible. Other than for that purpose, I feel like that’s a very bad idea haha